Ernestine started up. "Uncle, I told you once before that I will not endure that tone!"
"Beg pardon, but such folly provokes a jest. Or perhaps the book has a deeper value for you? You need not blush,--I can guess. It is a remembrance of the knight of the oak,--Möllner! Ah, then indeed we must certainly take it with us."
"Uncle," cried Ernestine, taking the book from him as he was about to put it in with some others, "you know how to depreciate with your sneering speeches everything that I have held dear. Let the book alone; I will give it to little Käthchen."
"And when Professor Möllner visits her, and finds it there, it will touch his heart, that the friend whom he has forsaken has guarded his memory so faithfully until now. If he turns over its leaves, he will doubtless find the oak leaf that you have pressed among them. Perhaps he will think it a mute farewell, and bestow upon you a tear of compassion. How gratifying it will be!"
"Uncle, if I thought that, I would rather burn the book!"
"And that would, at all events, be the best thing to do with it. That self-conceited fellow is not worth the remembrance that you cherish of him. I would efface it, as I would every impression that is unworthy of you. Indeed, I have long been indignant, although I never spoke of it to you, at his so easily forgetting you. Such a woman as you are is not to be resigned like an article of merchandise about which buyer and seller cannot agree. He never loved you, or he would never have dreamed of making conditions in his proposal to you, as if you were to deem it a great honour that he should condescend to you. Trust me, I know the world and mankind thoroughly. He was in the greatest embarrassment, for he felt himself morally obliged to offer you his hand."
Ernestine started.
Leuthold continued, "I do not know how you conducted yourself towards him, but, with your inexperience and the preference that you entertain for him,--do not deny it,--it is reasonable to suppose that you must have made advances."
Ernestine bit her lip, and looked down.
"The one fact that you accompanied him to his house alone, without any intimate acquaintance with him,--without an invitation from his mother,--must have led him to fancy that you were desperately in love with him, and he was conscientious enough to wish to efface the stain that you had thus unwittingly cast upon your honour, by asking you to be his wife. I do not question for a moment that his intentions towards you from the very beginning were honourable and kind, but his feelings seem to me to have been those of simple friendship, until your advances forced him, as it were, to a declaration. Probably he is now congratulating himself in silence upon his fortunate escape. But you sigh and languish like a love-sick girl over his memory, and would carry the only gift that you have ever received from him, bestowed upon you out of sheer compassion when you were a fright of a child, across the ocean with you as a relic! Ernestine, what is the matter with you? For Heaven's sake, control yourself! What nonsense! You have actually contracted a habit of fainting!"